The cleaning team

It looks like for the duration of my stay in Wellington I will be working for accomodation every morning. It's just too good of a deal to pass up. Besides me there are four other women on the cleaning team. They are all Maori and all of them are very interesting characters.

Fiona is my supervisor. She talks fast, works fast and calls all of us girl when she is speaking. I have trouble with her accent sometimes. When she says 410 I hear 14. She thinks it's because she doesn't speak proper english which isn't true its just with a vacuum running I can't really hear. It's interesting, when she is around the girls she is loud and running around but when a boss comes in she gets real quiet. I don't mean that she doesn't talk I mean that her decibel level decreases.

It seems that all of the other girls live around each other just outside of the city. They all have kids and I don't think any of them are older than 35. Most of them work other jobs on top of this one. It's interesting to see the class difference between all of us. I am here in New Zealand on vacation and decided to work for accomodation to save money so that when I go to the south island and to fiji I will have more to spend. They are working at the same job to support families and to make a living. I think Fiona is the only one out of the girls that has a car, the rest take the bus into work. Another thing about the cleaning team that is interesting is that they really don't like the reception workers. They feel like the reception workers think that the cleaners are below them. One of the other cleaning workers, Ian, who is probably late thirties actually told me that he was hurt because the reception people were going out drinking but none of them thought to invite the cleaners. From my interaction with the reception people I don't feel that they think that I am below them, but then again they know I am a backpacker and doing this for a relatively short amount of time to save money. Interesting stuff.

Anyway, even though they don't have thanksgiving Wellington still has a thanksgiving day parade. They just call it the Santa parade. I am pretty sure it's this weekend and I am definetly going to check it out. Of course nothing will ever compare to Macy's parade but it'll be an ok subsitute for this year. The stores already have christmas stuff up. Even though it will be summer in December the decorations are basically the same. Snowmen, tinsel, lights, light up Santa's sitting on a sled atop some snow. A lot of signs say "I am dreaming of a green christmas."
I am excited to see how the christmas season is going to be around here.

I start flipping burgers on wednesday but other than that my only goal for the week is to try and get a library card so that I can get books to read on the beach. It's a tough life I lead.